Let me preface this by saying this is an editorial. It’s completely biased and completely based on personal experiences from CNET’s website. It’s a bitch-fest.. a gripe.. nothing news worthy whatsoever so skip over it if you like.
With that said, has anyone noticed the decline in quality from the articles published over at CNET’s News.com? I’ve been a long time reader of News.com (8+ years now) and back in the good ol’ dot com days, the website was informative, detailed, and the writers were respectable and knowledgeable. Now? “It’s like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get”
Let’s just take a look at a sampling of today’s articles (Friday, Jan 2nd, 2009).
First up, we have Brooke Crothers with an article entitled “AMD inside Apple in 2009?” At first glance, one would think it was about some rumor but guess what? It’s actually an editorial about how Apple should consider placing AMD chips inside their products. The reason? AMD is the only vendor to offer a competitive CPU and graphics core.
Let me get this straight…
Apple should dump a better processor from Intel to go with AMD which has a lower performing processor yet better graphics core? Sound reasoning eh? This isn’t to say that I’m pro-Intel or anti-AMD. This simply makes zero business sense to me. If Apple can get away with bundling an NVIDIA GPU with an Intel CPU, then why in the world would the company consider going to a single source for both CPUs and GPUs? Now yes, we could speculate what is to come from AMD but that’s all SPECULATION. Nothing substantial at all and certainly not news worthy. Basically, this “article” is theory, and not based on any substantial source or information. The article should have been entitled “Why Apple should consider AMD in 2009” as opposed to “AMD inside Apple in 2009?”
Meanwhile, Candace Lombardi reports on “Yet more rumors of a solar Prius” – which tries to connect the dots between Solar Prius rumors and bad news (press releases) from Toyota. OK.. that might be true but how is this really all that interesting? Is this what News.com has come down to? Reporting on rumors? Leave that to us bloggers… leave it to Gizmodo, Engadget, heck to me. Maybe I’m being a bit mean here but I just expect MORE – especially since these publications should in theory have more resources, more clout.
Top top things off we have my favorite (I’m kidding) article for today (actually it was printed yesterday) by Don Reisinger. Entitled “Why unlocking the iPhone is a waste of time”, Mr. Reisinger goes into this diatribe about not understanding why people even bother unlocking the iPhone anymore. His whole point revolves around two points – 1) why unlock when T-Mobile isn’t much better than AT&T and 2) who needs to install banned applications when the Apple App Store has so many applications already.
What Mr. Reisinger fails to realize is that unlocking has nothing to do with installing banned applications. That my friend is called “jailbreaking” and there are plenty of reasons to jailbreak your iPhone – especially if the application you want (such as PDANet) isn’t allowed by Apple. As for unlocking the iPhone – hello? What audience is Apple trying to get more of? The mobile professional. And guess what? A large number of them travel abroad. Now when you go abroad, it’s extremely useful to swap out the SIM card for a local carrier else you’ll end up paying enormous roaming costs. In addition, there are plenty of T-Mobile customers in the U.S. who would love to have the iPhone and stay with their carrier – so why not get an unlocked iPhone if they can? Give them that choice!
Ultimately the real issue at hand is the quality of the writing coming from these reporters. I’ve seen it all at News.com – from simple spelling mistakes, to poor research, to poor understanding of the topics at hand. News.com is supposed to be a technology news outlet – it’s unfortunately turned into a shoddy publication with sub-par content.
I still have high hopes for the site. I’ve been going to the site long enough so I’m willing to give it a chance. However, if the site doesn’t improve in 2009, then I might finally have to give up on the publication completely.
